Di is All In

The more frequently a command is used, the fewer letters it should have, so the use of twokey commands like ls, mv, and df is second nature. We look at a previously little-known representative of this club, di.

To be fair, I have to admit that many two-letter commands compensate for their compact size with a breathtaking number of parameters. The tool I look at today, Di, is no exception. The name stands for “disk information” – it’s a kind df on steroids. Like its role model, Di delivers information about filesystems, but with much more detail, and the output filters are much better.

Figure 1 shows the output from di ‑a, a list of all mounted filesystems, including filesystems that do not exist physically but that the kernel hallucinates into the directory tree. The parameter ‑x lets you specify filesystems you want Di to hide (e.g., di ‑a ‑x proc keeps the /proc entry from being listed). You can also specify multiple filesystems in a comma-separated list:

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